Of course, they would ask when request this when the MotherUnitPrime was visiting and we know how well that goes. But it did buy me some time to really kinda dwell on what they were inherently asking. Art, as a rule, should spark emotion. It's one of it's main purposes. To find what makes our hearts tick and to recreate that sensation, often times, repeatedly. Sometimes that emotion is love, empathy, sadness, or, in the case of this political season, derision. There's nothing wrong with this. I like to think that's what the world is about. Keeping that thought and definition of art, I sought out titles that, at one point, made me shiver with emotional fear.
I'm a bad person to see a scary movie with. Sure, sure, sure, I jump with the rest of the audience at the right time. I say, "ew" at the right use of gore. But I'm too analytical and that sometimes hurts me. I know, as that poor man is walking alone from his dorm that fateful night, there's a cameraman, a director, a script person, and a special effects supervisor ready with the fake blood pump.
I know. I just killed the moment for you, didn't I?
The fact is, with that concept, I sometimes get pulled out of the movie. It's when I'm too absorbed, when all the ingredients hit the same stride of acting chops, decent writing, strong direction, and technical confidence, and forget, for a brief moment, that I'm watching a work of fiction. When I care if that young lady gets help across the street; should the dog live; stuff like that is when I know-yeah, you have a good scary movie.
And, no, I won't resort to Mariah Carey's Glitter. Scary for a totally different rubric.
Something else? There's way too much scifi on the list. I guess that says soemthing about how I view the future or something.
10.) World War Z Okay. I'm lying, right off the bat, with this movie. The movie I should be mentioning is the one that got me in elementary school. That one night I couldn't sleep. This was before any kind of channel selection. Before any ability to decide what I wanted. I just clicked on a black and white movie and there was the brother, saying, "they're coming to get you Barbara!"
I was intrigued.
And my little self did not sleep that night. The scar had been cut into my psyche. I still watch the movie when it is available and the husOtter is far from the television.
But here's the thing. When VHS came around, and rewatching things on YouTube ad naseum, the flaws started to flake off and I started to see where the movie could have cleaned up some. That's not a bad thing, folks. Look at Star Wars. Led up to a terrific love triangle and then...two are (ewwwww) related.
Some fucked up authoring, right there.
Time passes and this movie pops up onto my radar. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a crapload of horror movies out there prior to this moment, but this one? This one took the trope and refined it as a hurried moment that is buried in the story. Finally, all of those week ends of the tale, like what the fuck was happening with everything was suddenly sorted out. Now? I got to see it with a more global view. Better? It had an ending that actually worked and gave a, albeit small, closure.
9.) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (70's remake)-Lately, if you haven't been following, I've been very critical of Hollywood. More bent on cash flow, they're remaking movies left and right, realizing that people aren't willing to risk paying such expensive ticket prices on a movie that is, well, a risk.
Sometimes there's a payoff. Hey, I'm not stupid. And sometimes, well, there's a sheer money grab.
Then there was this great 70's movie, with Donald Sutherland. It took a great horror movie from the 50s and turned into our biggest fears, right there, when our biggest fears were being played out in real life. People were turning on one another. The children of the 60s were now the adults of the 70s and they feared, still, each other. And, like World War Z, there's a sense of scope, that makes escape totally impossible. Shiploads of alien pods being set up and people being dragged in for "health screenings" where they are given drugs to help them sleep. And...oh, my spine's tingling.
Sounds so much like when you find out your friends are for Frump. And they have been silent for so long.
8.) The Exorcist-Here's the thing about this movie. The movie itself fails to scare a jaded audience that's been watching this year's political races. But there's something deeper that it hits. I think it might be better to mention other titles out there that play the same horrors to much better and much more modern affect, like the terrific Conjuring 1 and 2, but I'm talking about finding yourself the original.
There's an art film, the first horror movie ever to nominated for Best Picture, but, again, it was symbolic of the fears that were coming to light in the 70s. The youth culture now had become an enemy within the Nuclear Family, literally, a little monster upstairs that wants to upset the wealthy status quo.
And only religion can quell it.
And that's only on the analogy front.
It's also a scary as fucking a chainsaw. Jolts? We got them. What's even better? There's no stalking. And the good guys HAVE to go into the room and face the possessed child. No turning back. All tightly packed. Good stuff, yo. Enjoy.
7.) Twilight Zone-The Movie Not what you expected, is it? The Twilight Zone was a terrific program back in the 50s and 60s that took the hottest topics of the day and turned them on their heads with delicious creativity and sparsely used horrific mystery. The filmmakers of the 80s had grown up on their imaginations of the darkest corners of the mind and made four short films that were of the highest production values of anything on the screen at the time. Three were outright horror and one was a wonderful amalgam between horror and children's movies that enlightens but horrifies with it's implications.
All of the movies are excellent.
But let me direct you to the last segment, "Horror at 30,000 Feet." In it, one of the greatest horror performances I've ever seen.
See? I have this brother, we'll call him Yutzface, who is petrified to fly. Scared to no end.
And John Lithgow is him. The man, scared beyond belief during a thunderstorm while flying, looks out and sees a monster on the wing of the aircraft.
The piece is directed by Mad Max creator, George Miller, and is an exercise in horror. No body count. No more than a cabin on a plane in a very, very bad situation. Fuck Snakes on a Plane. This will make you freak out until the plane....you'll see.
And, you know what? The other films are damn good, too. The first segment, by John Landis, shows a Donald Trump type, a racist bigot, suddenly get zoomed back in time to experience everything everyone else who was a minority has experienced. Spielberg is in there too, with a meditation on aging and the mind which is not scary, but has spooky overtones. There's another short, by Joe Dante, about a boy who wishes things into existence. Again, no body count, but a delicious piece of scares. Watch. Enjoy.
6,) Drag Me to Hell Ah, good old Sam Raimi. See, VHS killed the horror flick. Made on the cheap, horror movies became like pornography in the 80s, easy to come by and not very creative. That's where Sam came in. He made a cheap zombie movie (really, only one zombie, too), called The Evil Dead. But it was like Georgio Romero's Night of the Living Dead. A piece of pure creativity. And he didn't stop there. He went on to make movie after movie as a writer, director, producer.
The experience meant that he could get creative with each moment.
And then he made Drag Me to Hell. A tale about a woman who is not a saint, so her punishment isn't wholly excused, makes an executive banking decision that hurts the financial situation of an old immigrant. Shades of life today, where corporations make the call without the full story. The old gypsy curses her to a series of spectral punishments for over a week until the devil carries her off to the world of the dead. The scares are real, the story flows from incident to incident, ratching up the nightmares like a Hitchcock film. Is there a body count? Not really. But the invisble demons making havoc are worth the nightmares. Give it a go.
5. It Follows A simple premise that follows many modern horrors. As soon as the female lead has sex, the nightmares begin to taunt her. In this situation, a lisless night out with a boy who disappears gives her nightmares and this oncoming feeling of dread. Then things start to happen, like a stalker. She thinks it was the boy-and when she finds him, she realizes that there's a beast out there that follows a person until they couple with someone, and then follows the next victim until the someone is dead. The horror is too real for any woman who just has that one guy they need to escape from.
4. Jesus Camp I used to love Vacation Bible School. It was a great way to start up several bromances, hot teens I could hang with and yet leave at the end of the day without having to worry about the algebra on page six. Basically it was a church oriented mildly mature babysitting service. Made sense. They could earn a few bucks, and those pesky teens, prone to the evils of free time in the summer, won't get involved in any kind of shenanigans.
The key? The church could earn a few bucks.
Our current vice schmuck, Pense, see, is part of the board of one of those money makers-Focus on the Family. They have a pretty extensive cash cow out there in bogus gay conversion therapies and, why, yes, look, gay conversion therapy made it to the GOP platform.
Same for these camps. Tax free money for the higher up. And, just like any drug addict, you can get the kids addicted to church going and afraid of not doing otherwise. An ongoing source of funds, all motivated by fear and guilt.
Not unlike my mother's parenting styles.
Jesus Camp is a different kind of horror movie, albeit an unintended one. It's actually a documentary about several of these camps in the town of Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Yes, cut off far from the real world, so the kiddoes wont' escape. They minister to these children, screaming and yelling and making them cry, instilling that fear.
Remember, these tend to the GOP members that say they fear the indoctrination of children into the Islamic faith.
The stench of the horrors coats you and, by the end, you want to vomit, even though you've not seen a single piece of gore throughout the film. The horror is real. These people will be bringing their children into your hometown. At one point, a young girl, 7 or 8, starts to 'minister' to an older woman at a bowling alley. This is setting her up to be a victim. But the parents encourage it. It's a nightmare to behold.
3.) Poltergeist The thing I enjoyed about movies like Coraline, the Conjuring 1 and 2, even the Exocist, is that, even though the scares are real and the nightmares are right before us, there's no high body count. Surely, the stakes are medium, but more for something intangible. Our spirits. Really, I have yet to find a horror movie that is worthwhile with ghosts. The Sixth Sense is excellent, but really, the score of the movie is wide and vast.
But Poltergeist is a delicious, old school haunted house tale. Gory, monstoours, and moving at an incredible clip, it covers a ton of ground in a short amount of time. It's so good that old story tropes appear again, and are told so creatively and novel, we don't mind, but we suspect where the tale is going from the very beginning. There's also a deeper allegory of how the family is separating itself from the traditional past-escaping if you will-and forging ahead into one with technological horrors. Great scares, clear writing, a sight to behold.
2.) Silence of the Lambs Rarely is the movie as good as the book, but when you have a team like John Demme has assembled, this movie rips through the Oscars like bullet to the brain. Top notch performers give career changing performances and, yes, well, the movie reads just like the book it's based on. The true horror is not the serial killer, but the fact that the federal government has one locked up in Pennsylvania and are using him for information. A dangerous liaison develops and the symbolism begins-two wrongs don't right a situation.
What's better? By having the crafted hands of Anthony Hopkins play doctor Hannibal Lector (a character so good, they keep bringing back with terrible sequels and awful television programs, jsut to milk the franchise-fuck them all, come back to this point and see where the horrors began) for a mere 8 minutes of movie time, shows a confidence. He doesn't do a thing from his cell, but he's more threatening in language (thanks to an excellent script) than an angry man with a pistol. His physicality, limited to that tiny room, means the performer has to fill the space with manic energy and, yes, you start to become scared every time the police interview him. To combat that, they bring a young cadet, played by Jodie Foster, who is also so skilled, that you fear for her life.
Incredible stuff.
1.) The Thing Supposedly this is the horror movie ever made, and I tend to agree. A lone artic science base finds a stray dog being chased by a Norsk helicopter and save it.
The dog kills the other dog and escapes. Seems the Norweigns found an alien buried for a few centuries under the ice. A creature that can shape shift into any other creature.
And the adventure is on. Here we are talking about art and I cannot thank John Carpenter enough for his skill. You have all the needed requirements for horror, isolation, paranoia, lack of trust, increasing violence, and a setting of dread. A beautiful score and mostly unknown performers means we're not sure what to expect. Only one really famous name (Kurt Russell), so, we, as an audience, will guess he'll survive. But the rest of the movie? Who will? Since any of the teammates can be the alien as it expands its grasp, what can they do to find the truth?
Themes I'm noticing here? I'm very, very frightened by large groups of people doing bad things. Sorta like Washington. Or? Not necessarily bodies piling high, but spirits being torn. Better? Lotsa small room horrors, stuff that's up close and personal.
